Paula’s Kitchen Alchemy

Project Description

This was my Capstone Project to graduate with my Web Technologies Associates degree. We had to design it from scratch, concept, database, application structure, templating pages, graphics, content, style guide, etc. It had to be coded in PHP because that was the main objective of the class, with CSS and HTML of course, Javascript was optional. We were allowed to use a framework, and I chose Laravel, which was a learning curve all on its own! Laravel did some heavy lifting, but it was a steep learning curve, so I didn’t feel that I was making much progress until the last few weeks, so it was nerve-wracking.

What I loved about working with Laravel was delving deep into object-oriented programming with PHP, as it was a much more elegant, versatile, clean way to code. It was much faster to set up function libraries using Controllers and RESTful routing. The most difficult aspect of this project for me had to be the database, which I ended up redoing about five times during the course of the project. I had to keep scaling it down, simplifying it, so that it would work with Laravel’s parameters.

One of the requirements of the project was that it would have three different views–a guest, a member, and an admin view, which I called “guest, subscriber, and administrator” for what is essentially my cookbook that I have been developing for years, geared towards various dietary restrictions. If you do visit the site and do not wish to sign up, use the dummy account “Peabody” and password “boysherman” to sign in. You can also read about the launch of this project at my technical blog.